I went with an array of 1TB drives, which works well for my needs. I have redundant backups of EVERYTHING, on separate hard drives, all online and accessible instantly at hard drive bus speeds via my eSATA interface, and if one of my hard drives goes bad, I'll know it right away and be able to replace it, copy the backup to it, and have my redundant assurance/insurance again quickly. At the moment, I'm running with a 10TB hard drive system:

Here are the external drive enclosures:

Each of the Addonics enclosures holds 4 drives, and I've stuffed them with eight 1 Tb drives total. The top two Antec enclosures are single-drives, and they're each holding a 750 Gig drive. The final 500 Gigs is in my main system unit, but only used for operating system and programs. So, 10 TB at the moment, but a totally expandable system if I want to add more later.

Those 10 drives/cables all plug into a pair of e-SATA port multipliers (that's just an unrelated USB hub on top, for running my mouse and keyboard and importing data from my Photo Geo-tagging device):

Each port multiplier reduces 5 drives/cables down to 1:

And those two resulting cables are then plugged into a card on the motherboard of the main system unit.

SmugMug is an image hosting/sharing site. It should not be your storage solution. What happens to your photos if SmugMug is gone tomorrow? Seems unlikely? True, but so did the economic crash we've been experiencing for a while now.

Buckster, I'm impressed. But, tbh, I shouldn't be. You are doing it the way everybody should be doing it. Although I would probably be burning everything to disc too, on a regular basis. Expensive? Yes but I wasn't the one to say that digital photography is so much cheaper than film photography.

I was just talking, on another forum, about the loss of visual historical records that we will experience due to the advent of digital photography and the problem of storage so this thread is pretty timely. :er:

SmugMug is an image hosting/sharing site. It should not be your storage solution. What happens to your photos if SmugMug is gone tomorrow? Seems unlikely? True, but so did the economic crash we've been experiencing for a while now.

Buckster, I'm impressed. But, tbh, I shouldn't be. You are doing it the way everybody should be doing it. Although I would probably be burning everything to disc too, on a regular basis. Expensive? Yes but I wasn't the one to say that digital photography is so much cheaper than film photography.

I was just talking, on another forum, about the loss of visual historical records that we will experience due to the advent of digital photography and the problem of storage so this thread is pretty timely. :er:

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You make excellent points. This is the downfall of cloud-computing. Placing complete trust in a storage system that can and eventually will fail. Buckster has it all together. You're right... we should all emulate that setup. I just saw on the news today that a major Microsoft server network crashed and lost everyone's phone backup data (contacts, numbers, etc) for T-Mobile. Oops.

While Buckster has a great setup, the best backup is not in the same place. People loose everything in a fire or theft. If there is anything that you would be heart broken if it ever disappeared, I would find another solution such as a standalone drive stored elsewhere, or as I do, and upload via ftp to my host. granted everyone doesn't have a webhost, but I can keep backups of a few of my important files/photos where god forbid a fire cannot touch both backups at once.

While Buckster has a great setup, the best backup is not in the same place. People loose everything in a fire or theft. If there is anything that you would be heart broken if it ever disappeared, I would find another solution such as a standalone drive stored elsewhere, or as I do, and upload via ftp to my host. granted everyone doesn't have a webhost, but I can keep backups of a few of my important files/photos where god forbid a fire cannot touch both backups at once.

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Actually, the hard drive storage is my main working / storage / backup solution, but it's not the end of the story, specifically because of the possibility of a site disaster such as you've described.

Like you, I'm also uploading RAWs to the server that hosts my web site, as well as redundant DVDs; one for the fireproof safe and the other to my sister's house on the other side of town. I just don't think about them much, probably because I've been lucky enough not to ever have to resort to use them for a restoration (knock on wood).

Now if only I could just figure out a way to recover from the giant Earth-destroying meteor that will manage to get all of them in one shot anyway. 'Course... I guess I won't care too much after that, so...

Well i think people are saying that smugmug might me a temporary solution for maybe small amount of storage... if you are saving RAW images its going to eventually take up way too much space - thats all. Plus i would never trust my sole backup to 100% online non-tangible storage.
Just buy a few external HD's and make a few back ups. :lmao:

One setup that is a bit more simple is the DROBO,
It is a great solution for people that are not tech minded, it does all of it's own setup and monitoring. I have been using one for a while now and have been very happy, currently it is set up with four, 1 TB drives and is a setup similar to a Raid Array, but without the complexity for the user.

The only downfall I have found so far is the price, but once you have done the inital investment you should be good fo a while as it is expandable up to 16TB